Last week, JD Vance caused a stir at the Munich Security Conference in a speech that ignored security issues and instead lectured Europeans on their internal politics, namely the suppression of speech and mass migration. He took the German political class in particular to task for shutting out Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which the other major parties refuse to form coalitions with at the local and national levels. In a multiparty democracy with more than two competitive parties that means that it is in effect rendered powerless, in Vance’s view robbing its voters of representation.
The media has raised a ruckus over this. On Sunday, CBS anchor Margaret Brennan lectured Marco Rubio on how Germany was a country in which “free speech was weaponized to commit a genocide.” That same night, 60 Minutes did a generally sympathetic feature on speech restrictions in Germany. The AfD is consistently referred to as something of a fascist or Nazi-adjacent party in the American media, with the implication that it would be crazy to allow it to have political power in the nation that gave the world the Holocaust. After the segment with Rubio aired, Brennan tweeted out a link to an ADL article on the AfD that lists the usual charges.
The AfD of course does not call itself a Nazi or fascist party. It doesn’t advocate the Hitlerian goals of invading Poland, union with Austria, or eliminating the Jews from public life. Here is its 2025 party platform, which I had ChatGPT summarize in English.
The AfD calls for cutting taxes, ending state subsidies for renewable energy, and bringing back nuclear power. It wants more deportations, to limit immigration, and to restrict social benefits given to non-citizens. It opposes quotas and gender identity. Typical right-wing stuff, none of it particularly shocking.
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I've always found it unusual that fascism and racism have become so lexically linked. The US, Canada, and Australia have forever been liberal democracies from their founding as federations to the present, and they were each founded by undeniable racists (Australia's founders even wanted to enshrine white supremacy in their constitution but were told not to by London due to the Anglo-Japanese alliance). Whereas Italy became fascist in 1922 and didn't pass racial laws until 1938 due to the influence of the Third Reich. Various regimes in Latin America could be plausibly described as fascistic and lacked a racial supremacist ideology. It goes without saying that both racism and fascism are grave political ills; nevertheless, it's unwarranted to frame them as inextricably linked as the press often does. Winston Churchill, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Deakin, and Thomas Jefferson were all white nationalists and not fascist in the slightest. Regimes the US backed during the Cold War were fascistic but often indifferent to race.
In the case of Germany it might seem sensible to strongly link the two, but even then it's questionable, as West Germany was explicitly not a nation of immigrants, and Germany only loosened its naturalization laws under Merkel. Hence, a German nativist may well be ideologically closer to Adenauer than to Hitler.
On a side note, Japan arguably catches even more unjustified flak than Germany for historical baggage. People are at least aware of Germany's apologies for Nazism (though their crimes in Namibia are less well known), whereas people falsely claim Japan hasn't apologized for its crimes (despite Murayama's and Fukuda's statements). When Japanese textbooks for kids don't dedicate as much space on atrocities, it draws international criticism, and Japanese PMs are often not even able to pay respects to the fallen due to international criticism.
A funny anecdote about the AfD and speech laws in Germany:
> Alice Weidel said “Political correctness belongs on the dustbin of history” at an AfD party conference in 2017. The moderator Christian Ehring picked up on this in the satirical show extra 3 and said: "Yes, enough of political correctness. Let's all be incorrect." And he added: "The Nazi slut is right." Alice Weidel took legal action against this statement and received the following assessment from the court: "A violation of general personal rights can only be assumed if the statement, which has been exposed from its satirical guise, affects the dignity of the person concerned at its core." Since "Nazi" + "slut" were used here in a clearly recognizable satirical way, Weidel lost in court.
Taken from this compilation of statements from AfD members:
https://jugendstrategie.de/hasserfuellte-und-menschenverachtende-zitate-der-afd/